Tony Rigby is our guest for Monday’s Bank Holiday clash with Cheadle Town, James Bentley looks back on his career.
Ask a Bury fan between the ages of about 38 and 50 who their favourite player is and it’s a certainty that a significant proportion will answer ‘Tony Rigby’.
He is their Greg Farrell, the skilful maestro with a football, the silky maverick who scored some of the greatest goals they ever saw from the time when football meant everything to them – more than their school work, their first, tentative steps into employment and their nightlife in Waldo Peppers and the Roxy.
Rigby’s arrival at Gigg Lane was inauspicious to say the least. We knew that in John King, Mike Walsh’s assistant manager in the 1992/93 season, we had a member of the backroom staff who knew the non-league scene inside-out. Nick Daws had already been recruited and, though starting the season playing on a part-time basis, he was fast becoming the reliable, solid pro who would go onto have the most efficient of careers. So when the fashionably-straggly-haired Rigby came from Barrow as the Shakers pushed for promotion from the basement at the first attempt in 1993, hopes were high.
Over the next six years, he didn’t disappoint. Coming straight into the side, he made a midfield berth his own and showed a sign of things to come with an excellent goal at York in the league before Bury missed out in the play-offs to the same side, featuring one Dean Kiely in goal.
Further magical performances followed in the damp squib that was the 1993/94 season but it was in the following campaign that his stock really rose. His incredible goal against Preston in the second leg of the play-off semi-final played on the Gigg Lane mudbath and sandpit is a favourite goal for a generation of fans and he was only the width of a post away from getting Bury back into the resulting final against Chesterfield at Wembley.
The next season brought with it more spectacular strikes including those against Reading – twice – and Lincoln and Cardiff, the latter coming on the day Bury finally escaped the basement.
Although he played a restricted role in the second successive promotion season which followed, Tony’s attitude and nature meant that he was the perfect person to have in the squad to keep spirits high as the jitters set in. Yet when he was offered his opportunity in the second tier, he grabbed it with both hands as anyone who was at St Andrews on that chilly night in February 1998 will testify. To score from such a distance, against a goalkeeper who was part of a team pushing for the Premier League, with such an audacious distance, was Tony Rigby all over.
It’s why he’s loved and why he’ll get such a terrific response from the fans today.
